“Look at this,” says Reese Witherspoon. Perched on a canvas stool in a large air-conditioned hangar just outside New Orleans, she is wearing a short, bright-red dress, a silver-studded belt, and brown fringed cowboy boots.

On a small monitor in front of her is playing a scene from the comedy she is shooting with Sofía Vergara, as the wife of a Mexican drug kingpin; Witherspoon is the by-the-book cop Vergara spends most of the movie handcuffed to. It’s basically Midnight Run in high heels; and in the scene we are watching, both women are escaping through the tiny window of a bathroom stall. For the sirenish Vergara, it’s quite a squeeze. She tumbles through, stands up, dusts herself off, and quickly checks her teeth with her finger. Witherspoon hoots.

“Isn’t that brilliant?” she says. “Because her character’s Colombian, and her teeth are expensive. She’s like Sophia Loren. The studios should be falling over themselves to make movies for this woman.”

With her electric-blue eyes, dazzling smile, and determined chin, Witherspoon’s face is only ever a heartbeat away from the expression worn by the winners of beauty pageants. At five feet two, she is petite—Vergara’s nickname for her is My Little Pony. But she is both more easygoing and shrewder than the uptight perfectionistas she plays on-screen, with a no-nonsense, room-temperature affect that sets you quickly at ease. “She makes you feel like you’re speaking to someone you’ve known for a very long time,” says Jeff Nichols, who directed her in 2013’s critical darling Mud, “not by having some sorority-sister Southern charm where she brings you cookies and makes you tea. But by saying that really smart thing at just the right time.”

This film, with its touches of rhinestone and slapstick, may resemble the bubble gum–hued comedies with which Witherspoon cemented her stardom in the 2000s, but it’s no studio picture. Helmed by 27 Dresses director Anne Fletcher, it was developed independently by Witherspoon and her producing partner Bruna Papandrea, one of the flagships for their new production company, Pacific Standard, devoted to making movies for, about, and starring women. Witherspoon decided she wanted to make a comedy with Vergara and presented her with several ideas. After the Modern Family star chose this one, they commissioned a script, came up with a budget and a schedule, and then took it to the studios, who immediately started bidding.

“I discovered from years of developing comedies with the studios, you end up chasing copious amounts of notes about the same joke,” says Witherspoon as Fletcher calls for shooting to resume over on the other side of the hangar. “It’s only funny and fresh, what—two, three times? It’s much better if you can fast-track it and just say, ‘Sofía and I want to do it, and this is when we’re available. . . .’ ”

Witherspoon is tired but hiding it beautifully. Last night she was up until 4:00 a.m., being shaken around by a bus mounted on air-controlled pistons in the middle of the hangar. As shooting begins, Witherspoon juggles acting in the scenes; entertaining her young nieces Abby James and Draper, who are visiting the set; arranging for soup to be sent to Vergara, who has a cold; and discussing schedules with Papandrea. One can’t but notice a certain neatness to the way Witherspoon crosses the _t’_s and dots the _i’_s of her fame—she carries herself with the same spirit in which someone might complete a set of thank-you notes. Only later, returning to her trailer for a lunch of watermelon salad, does she admit, “My nerves are shot. I’m a morning person.”

Her trailer is piled high with books: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler; Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, by Diane Keaton; The Vacationers, by Emma Straub; The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman. She is constantly on the lookout for new material; she has just optioned Liane Moriarty’s New York Times best seller Big Little Lies. But Pacific Standard is no vanity exercise. Two years ago, Witherspoon snapped up the rights to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, initially thinking of herself for the lead, but after she found out that director David Fincher wanted someone “cool and unapproachable” for the part—it eventually went to Brit Rosamund Pike—she was happy to step aside. “Whatever I am, I’m not that,” she says with a cackle. It was a different matter with Wild: From Lost to Foundon the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of love and death and hiking. Witherspoon read galleys of the book, which Strayed had sent her through her agent, on a return flight from L.A. to New York. By the time she landed, Witherspoon was in tears. She knew she wanted to play Strayed and called her the next day. “Reese really understands that when you’re passionate about something, you have to just jump on,” says Papandrea. “The only other person I know who reads the way she does is Nicole Kidman.”

Even Strayed was taken aback by the speed with which the adaptation came together. “Boy, this is happening so fast,” she remembers emailing Nick Hornby after he was assigned the task of adapting the book. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “You know there’s like a 10 percent chance of this happening.” He finished his first draft of the screenplay in three months. Papandrea calls it “one of the best I’ve ever read.” Grudgingly, Hornby recalculated the odds. “OK, there’s a 17 percent chance this movie is happening.” Then, in August, _Dallas Buyers Club’_s Jean-Marc Vallée came onboard as director. “OK,” Hornby emailed Strayed, “25 percent.” A week before the movie was due to go into production, costarring Laura Dern and _Game of Thrones’_s Michiel Huisman, Strayed checked in with him. “OK. I can’t believe this, but 85 percent.”

“I don’t know, Nick; I think we’re going to make the movie,” said Strayed.

Hornby had reckoned without the speed that comes when a big star like Witherspoon decides to go the indie route. Call it the reeducation of Tracy Flick. The Oscar-winning actress who commanded as much as $20 million a film in the 2000s has downsized, conquering the indie-film world with the surety with which she once carried off pillbox hats. In Mud she was the sullen trailer-trash ex-flame of Matthew McCon­aughey’s wild-eyed drifter—a small, hard gem of a performance hinting at unseen facets in the actress. In Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern, shaggy-dog detective novel, she plays an assistant district attorney and the main squeeze of Joaquin Phoenix’s pot-addled detective. “She’s out in search of some hippie love thrills, basically,” says Anderson. “Buttoned up during the day, out watusi-ing at night.”

It’s the first time the two actors have been reunited since their explosive pairing in Walk the Line. Witherspoon seems to work best opposite unruly men, suggesting that she is one of those actresses who outsource their chaos to their partner, the better to hold strong at center. “Why the two of them work together so well, I don’t know,” says Anderson. “It’s like watching a professional athlete dominate their sport. After only four days of shooting, I really didn’t want to let her go. I started to think of other scenes we could create so she wouldn’t leave. Ultimately, she knew these ideas were bad and said, ‘Adios, fellas.’ ”

The day after my set visit, I meet Witherspoon for lunch at La Petite Grocery in the Uptown District of New Orleans. It’s 90 degrees outside, but she looks crisp and cool in a Stella McCartney dress and Valentino sandals, with a pretty Mannin monogrammed necklace and cuff. Her eldest kids—Ava, fifteen, and Deacon, ten, from her marriage to Ryan Phillippe—are at camp right now. Her youngest, two-year-old Tennessee, with husband Jim Toth, is asleep. Yesterday they took him to get his hair cut, bribing him with ice cream to stay still. “He’s like a blond version of my husband. He’s so pretty. The older he gets, the more and more he looks like him. So cute.”

Toth is an executive at CAA, where Witherspoon is a client. He represents Vergara and also McConaughey, and seems to have been something of a behind-the-scenes facilitator for Witherspoon’s recent career recalibration. “It’s an agency thing,” says Nichols. “They’re like, ‘What do you think about Reese?’ They want to take everybody’s temperature. ‘Wow, do you think she would do that?’ ‘I don’t know . . . would you want her to do that?’ ” The studios had been trying to get her and McConaughey in a film together for a long time, and Witherspoon was initially worried her presence would “unbalance” Nichols’s film, a drama about love and myth on the Mississippi riverbank as beautifully shaped as a piece of driftwood. “Look, you’re going to make this ratcheted-down, realistic film,” she told him. “Before you know it, you’re going to see a trailer with me and Matthew cut into every shot.”

Witherspoon is acutely aware of the baggage that comes with her screen persona—upbeat, a little uptight, the most likely of all her contemporaries to let fly with a “shoot” or “dagnabbit.” After a string of films—Water for Elephants, This Means War, How Do You Know—did badly at the box office, she picked up an issue of The New Yorker one day and was appalled to find herself listed among a number of actors, Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson included, whose days as box-office titans were behind them. “And there I was thinking I was reading about Ben Stiller!” she says with mock indignation from which not all traces of real indignation have been removed. “Thank God their articles are so long. I was on page six. Nobody can have got that far.”

But the challenges she faced in finding a new direction for herself were real enough. “It’s not that the roles dried up,” she says. “They just weren’t as dynamic or as interesting as anything I felt I could do.” Partly this had to do with a film industry more attuned to fashioning entertainment for teenage boys than roles for 30-something actresses, even Oscar-winning ones, and partly it had to do with her. One A-list director she won’t name refused to see her for a part because he said she was too “ ‘Southern and sweet and huge.’ I was like, ‘All right, back to the drawing board.’ ” If the roles she wanted were not coming to her, she would create them for herself. “When people underestimate me, it’s actually a comfortable place for me,” she says. “ ‘Oh, that’s what you think I am; well, no, I’m not.’ I’m a complex human being. I have many different shades.”

Certainly Reese Witherspoon and wild have not, until a couple of years ago, been a combination that would turn up much in a Google search. It’s not too hard to see what a star seeking to shed her studio gleam might find in Strayed’s memoir, a raw, soulful portrait of a woman cut off from the human pack, a “stray,” stripped to the core after the death of her mother and the collapse of her marriage. As she sets about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she finds herself dismantling and rebuilding her very identity as a woman, “the one I’d fostered all through my young adult years while trying on different costumes,” Strayed writes in the book, “earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me.”

Honeycombed with flashbacks capturing Strayed’s passionate relationship with her mother—a luminous Dern—and the reeling impact of her death, Wild was shot using the same method Vallée worked out for Dallas Buyers Club: a minimal crew, using hand-held cameras and natural light whenever possible. “If the actors got it right with all the movement on rehearsal one, well, that becomes take one,” Vallée says. Lugging a backpack affectionately nicknamed Monster that weighed up to 60 pounds, Witherspoon had to repeatedly haul herself up and down the same stretch of snowy mountain slope or plunge into a freezing river. “It was brutal,” says Dern. The scenes on the trail in particular felt, says Witherspoon, “more like a documentary than a feature film,” and the result has a remarkable candor: What stays with you is Witherspoon’s face, plain and unadorned by makeup, slack yet resolute, unillumined by the effort of charming or entertaining people. One of cinema’s great crowd-pleasers, alone.

“There are sentences that I wrote that I can see written on her face,” says Strayed, who met with the actress a few weeks before production started, at the author’s house in Portland. They walked all over the neighborhood, talking for hours about “everything from our childhood to our parents and what we were like in high school to our sex lives and our love lives and our romantic histories,” says Strayed. They touched, too, on the incident earlier in the year in Atlanta, where Witherspoon was shooting The Good Lie, a Blind Side–ish heart-warmer about Sudanese refugees, when she and her husband were stopped by police; Toth was charged with a DUI, while police footage of Witherspoon remonstrating with the officer was splashed all over TMZ.

“She said to me, ‘When those things happen, it just proves what I’ve always been telling people, and that is I’m not perfect,’ ” Strayed tells me. “There’s nothing artificial about her. I think that’s what makes her such a spectacular actress and such a relatable movie star, too. Reese is one of us. She’s real people.”

I wonder if part of the appeal of Wild for Witherspoon isn’t this: that an actress who has been balancing her checkbook since the age of fourteen, and who cannot make a misstep without its being pounced on by the tabloids, gets to play a woman who has made some of the biggest mistakes you can make and then owned them. The film is unflinching in its portrayal of the bottom Strayed hit after the death of her mother, dabbling with heroin and embarking on a string of one-night stands as if trying to awaken her grief-numbed senses. Witherspoon knew no studio would let her go there. “I just didn’t want to hear, ‘Oh, we don’t want to see Reese have sex. . . . Oh, can we not have any profanity?’ ” says Witherspoon. “I wanted it to be truthful, I wanted it to be raw, I wanted it to be real.”

Part of the authenticity of Strayed’s memoir stemmed from its being no publishing stunt, written to order. She embarked on the hike when she was 26; it took her more than a decade to get it down on paper; the results have the burnish and weight of rings in a tree trunk. Did Witherspoon have to weather a few storms of her own before being able to play the part? She thinks awhile before answering. “Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors, but I think there’s a general sense now that I’ve lived a pretty”—she searches for the right word—“textured life. So many of the things that Cheryl goes through in the book I’ve been through, you know? I’ve been married, I’ve been divorced. I haven’t lost my mother, but my mother’s mother died in a very similar way, of an aneurysm very suddenly. . . . Cheryl has this idea that the things that have happened to you are part of you. There’s something really beautiful about that idea.”

Does she believe that herself? She sounds a little wistful, as if describing a fairy tale, something beautiful but untrue. “I’m not sure I agree with her about everything. Someone might say, ‘I was raped. Is that a part of me? Am I supposed to accept that?’ That’s her perspective.” One senses in this something of Witherspoon’s conflict between her instincts as an actress, which she must follow into whatever dark corner they lead her, and her responsibilities as a star and role model for young girls. Her Episcopalianism runs deep. She’s known to take her children to church, and to put parental blocks on their computers. Witherspoon found the drug scenes in Wild hard to film—on set Strayed had to show Witherspoon how to shoot heroin; “I was like ‘Come on, people, haven’t you guys ever done this?’ ” recalls the author—but even more difficult were the sex scenes, which Witherspoon so dreaded that she employed a hypnotist to help quell her nerves.

“She’d never done a scene like this before,” says Vallée, who remembers her wondering, “Am I doing the right thing?” right up until he called action. “She’s in the place in her life where she has everything. She doesn’t have to do this. She has a husband, a great house, a great career, money, children. She has everything. And yet she’s still compelled to do something great, go outside of her comfort zone, show something new. It’s not about her showing off and trying to do the ultimate performance. It’s just her. ‘I’m almost naked here, and I’m a 37-year-old, and I’m not perfect, but it’s all right, all right, let’s do it.’ ”